Meaning
To narrowly avoid something harmful, disastrous or unwelcome, usually through luck or timing rather than skill. The image is of a bullet whizzing past instead of striking home. Cambridge labels the idiom mainly US and informal; it is typically used in hindsight, once the danger has become visible: we dodged a bullet when the deal fell through. Informal; almost always past tense or perfect aspect because the escape is judged in hindsight. Do not confuse with bite the bullet, already catalogued here, which is about enduring something painful, not escaping it. Regional use: Chiefly American English (Cambridge: mainly US), widely understood elsewhere.
Origin
Bullet entered English in the mid-1500s from French boulette, a little ball: the OED's earliest evidence is Robert Recorde's 1557 writings, and the firearm-projectile sense dates from the 1570s. Literal nineteenth-century collocations about soldiers dodging bullets show up in the corpus from 1887 onward, but the figurative idiom is late twentieth century: Wiktionary's earliest citation for the figurative use is the New York Times of 7 December 1989, and Google Books data show dodged a bullet climbing sharply from the mid-1980s. No accessible historical dictionary offers an earlier first attestation, so claims that the idiom is 1940s or 1950s slang are unverified. It sits semantically with older near-miss idioms such as close call and close shave, but it is a separate phrase, not a recorded variant of them.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- dodge the bullet
- dodged a big bullet
Usage Examples
- When the startup folded six months later, she realized she had dodged a bullet by turning down the job.
- The city dodged a bullet when the hurricane weakened overnight.
- I think we dodged a bullet by selling the house before the market turned.